My graphics card clock speed is less than what the specs of the card .. Normal ?

[Peltac]

Just trying to get the most out of my 780 before bf4 is released as i plan to record gameplay with it.

I have a program called thundermaster that came with my PC. It is showing that my core is 901mhz and current speed is 300-400.

But according to the link below the card core speed should be 980. Is this normal. I don't really know much about the hardware end of computers but i would think that 7-8% less core speed will affect my fps.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Palit/GeForce_GTX_780_Super_JetStream/

To add to the confusion my friend has an Evga 780 Classified
NVIDIA GTX 780
2304 CUDA Cores
993 MHz Base Clock
1046 MHz Boost Clock
190.6GT/s Texture Fill Rate

Which appear to have very similar specs yet on benchmarks such as 3dmark he out preforms me by about 1000 graphics score. He is using the new beta drivers as he played the BF4 beta. I am using the most recent and i am assuming more stable regular driver.

Would a driver make this much difference ?

Another quick queston as when i googled it all i got was info about the xbox one.

What is boost clock speed? Is that like a preset overclock. Is the card supposed to be running at the boost clock speed when it arrives from manufacturer or do i have to turn it on myself.

Sorry figured i would get all my questions out of the way instead of making loads of little posts Just trying to make sure i am getting the most out of this card. It is the first high end gaming rig ive got and cost me 3 times what i usually pay for my rigs

 

[DRDNA]

What you are probably seeing is your 2D clock speeds and not 3D game clock speed. AMD does the same thing.

 

[Sasqui]

What you are probably seeing is your 2D clock speeds and not 3D game clock speed. AMD does the same thing.

^ this. I'd suggest running furmark in windowed mode while watching your clocks climb... at your own risk, many people here think furmark will ruin your card

 

[BazookaJoe]

Yep, most gfx cards run at lower speeds when they are not actually doing any heavy 3D work to save power and keep cool, any number of tools such as Process Explorer or GPU-Z can be left open in the background, and draw graphs of your actual stats as you play a game - after you come back to windows you will be able to check what your actual stats where by looking at the graphs / logs.

In the pic below you can see the GPU-Z graphs of my little laptop loading and running a short benchmark then returning to windows - you will see the graphs pick up as the workload increases then significantly drop off as I go back to the desktop - on any of the graphs in GPU-Z you can hover the mouse over the graph at a specific point to see the exact value at that point.